Thursday, February 04, 2010

Waited Too Long For a Ship to Appear

There were soft sunrise colors out over the Strait this morning, but they faded while I was waiting to catch a picture of a ship crossing the bottom of the street, with the sky beyond. No ships. Mount Baker was quite bright for a while, too tiny for my camera. Still, as most always, there is the water horizon, with the hills of another country in the background.

Early Morning, February 4, 2010. (Click for a more realistic contextual image.)

The sun shines more often on the Victoria waterfront over there. While we sit under our lid of clouds, the buildings 20 miles away gleam. Today for a while it was also shining brightly on the snowy mountains behind the bottom corner of Vancouver Island, on the distant tall Coast Ranges on the mainland peeking up behind the middleground. (See map of the line of sight from here-ish to there-ish.)

The truth is that since the 8th Street bridges re-opened a year ago, this apartment is on a very noisy street. The real cost of the wide expanse of windows, the light, and the Strait, is that often I have to tune out traffic. Given the amount of time I spend stopped on my way across the room, simply looking out the window—checking on the weather or the water or a huge passing freighter or Mount Baker 100 miles away— so far it's a bargain.

1 comment:

robin andrea said...

It is always so grand to be able to look far into the distance, and most especially across bodies of water. I remember the light on Mt Baker, often an ephemeral thing. By the time I brought the camera to my eye, zoomed and focussed, it was gone.